An interaction between an employee of a company and an individual who has availed himself or herself of the company's services is typically referred to as a customer service interaction. For example, a customer service interaction can include an account holder calling a financial company to discuss investment options, a patient calling to schedule an appointment with a doctor, and a pension holder calling to retrieve information about his benefits.
Customer service interactions can provide varying degrees of service quality. Some customer service interactions can be of better quality than other customer service interactions. For example, a customer could have a conversation with an experienced customer service representative (CSR) who addresses each of the customer's needs and assists the customer to achieve his desired goals in every respect. As an example, such an interaction may be characterized as having better quality of service compared to a call where the CSR does not adequately answer any of the customer's questions and fails to assist the customer to achieve what the customer wants.
Numerous challenges exist in measuring the quality of customer service interactions due to the wide array of interactions and people involved. For example, different associates may interact with different individual customers, different interactions may have different degrees of difficulty, and different environmental factors may influence customer satisfaction.
One current way to measure a customer's satisfaction with customer service is to ask the customers to manually fill out a survey. Generally, survey response rates are low, with a response rate of 20%-30% considered highly successful, and 10%-15% considered normal. In addition to the low response rate, survey sample size is hard to determine and the margin of error can be difficult to calculate. Slight variations of the target population can result in different survey results as well.
The most challenging customer satisfaction measurement problem is that very satisfied customers and very unhappy customers are typically more vocal than other customers. Such vocal customers are more likely to spend time to fill out surveys. A large percentage of people who consider the service as expected are the silent majority from which it is difficult to obtain meaningful customer service feedback. Thus, the coverage of the survey is not guaranteed. A small proportion of the customers can easily swing the overall satisfaction rating by being more vocal than others. Such survey results are hardly a proportional simulation of the real customer interaction experiences. Customers may also exaggerate their feelings in survey results. It is difficult to objectively measure customer service quality from every customer. There are many issues with the unbiasedness of the current system of measuring customer satisfaction.